Online Job Openings Essentially Flat for June: Report

National job vacancies for May and June have flip-flopped into flatness. May saw a decline, but June saw a slight increase. New York metro is the big gainer, but California is the biggest loser.

Like the weather, job openings depend on where you live. New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania are running hot, but California is filled with cooler June gloom as the state saw the largest decline in job openings in the month, losing 46,800 vacancies.

Job vacancies for June were considered unchanged nationally as tracked online by the non-profit, pro-business organization The Conference Board as reported in its monthly Help Wanted OnLine series. The supply-and-demand rate is 3.62 unemployed persons for every job vacancy which is a marked improvement from the 4.73 rate from last October.

"In the last two months, labor demand has been little changed following a strong start for spring hiring in April," said June Shelp, vice president at The Conference Board. "Thus far, job demand has been uneven across geographies and occupations, and weakness in the housing market is one factor."

Technology job postings for the month were down 12,700 nationally at 554,900, as were management, and administrative positions. On the rise, health care and business financial operations. Health care was the largest gainer by 51,900 at 592,300 postings.

Job vacancies moved slightly up last month by 19,600 to 4,154,000, but May saw a decline in openings. Regionally, the Northeast was the big gainer adding 50,600 online postings, while the West saw declines of 51,600 as did the Midwest which dropped more than 20,000 vacancies. The South saw increases of 49,200.

"While all states have experienced some positive upturn in labor demand, states that were heavily impacted by the housing market downturn, in general, are rebounding more slowly," said Shelp. "Also, occupations that are most closely associated with real estate-construction, architecture and engineering and legal-have been slower to advertise for additional workers while the labor demand in other occupations such as sales, entertainment, food preparation, and healthcare and personal care have already risen to pre-recession levels."
Some of the largest metropolitan areas in the U.S. are seeing healthy year-over-year increases in job vacancies. From the report:

"Among the three metro areas with the largest numbers of advertised vacancies, the New York metro area was 45 percent above its June 2009 level, the Washington, D.C., metro area was 28 percent above its June 2009 level, and the Los Angeles metro area was 8 percent above last year's level."

In a forthcoming report from Glassdoor.com on employment confidence, less than half of nearly 3,000 workers are facing cuts in pay, bonuses and benefits.